Category Archives: Hardware

I have been mulling the idea of building a high-performance yet low-power and low-noise computer for a while. My last PC is over 5 years old, the disk drives are even older, and while the Intel Core i5-750 Lynnfield still performs ok, the 8GB memory and the messed-up Windows 7 made a rebuild necessary anyway. German computer magazines routinely publish recommended builds for this type of computer, but often times they use parts that are not easily available here in the US. So I gave up on this plan and finally took the time to do my own research and put something together myself. Continue reading →

We took my son’s GoPro Hero 3 Black Edition skiing for the first time this Christmas. The camera was an Easter present from last March, but it took him a while to find interest in using it. It had not seen much use at all. So here we are in <10°F temps and the camera freezes after 2-3 minutes of recording. It just stopped recording or responding to button presses, and the only way to turn it off was by removing the battery.
Back at the inn I researched the issue and found that other people saw an improvement of these symptoms after a firmware update. So I downloaded the latest firmware (3.03), put it on the (Sandisk Ultra) SD card, and turned the thing on. That was the end of it. Since then all it ever does is turn itself on and off again after 3 beeps, forever.

The camera is technically still under warranty, but based on the chatter in the support forum and the reviews on Amazon.com I expect the worst from here on, i.e. support being slow to respond (so far I have not heard anything back), being sent equally defective replacement units and this becoming a bottomless time sink without us ever having a working camera again.

I tried different cards, I reformatted the card on my PC, and I downloaded the firmware again. Same results. It does not start up properly anymore, whether I am doing a firmware update or just in normal operation.
While it worked, it took great pictures.

There are now hundreds and hundreds of negative reviews on Amazon with complaints about a variety of unresolved issues with this camera. The GoPro support staff must be hopelessly overwhelmed with requests for an exchange like mine, and there must be a serious impact to their bottom line by now. Clearly, replacing frustrated customers’ broken and returned cameras with someone else’s broken and returned camera will in the long run not be a viable business model. This has been going on for at least a year now, and I am wondering if GoPro will be the next action camera manufacturer of the past.

One of the many things that have confused me for a while after switching to Windows 8 is the UI for the Bluetooth stack. The way one interacted with Bluetooth devices in previous versions was always a little haphazard. It became worse in Windows 8, because the Bluetooth Device Control dialog appears to have disappeared. This is the dialog that had the Connect button. When we click on the Bluetooth icon in the tray, or access the devices via the PC settings in the Charms menu, all we see is a list of paired devices, and the only option here is to unpair them:Continue reading →

About a week ago my new laptop arrived – a Thinkpad T430s with Core i7-3520M and 16 GB RAM. I only ordered the 128G SSD, because I was planning to use the 480GB Mercury Electra from my old laptop, a Thinkpad T410. The old laptop was already running Windows 8, so I did not expect compatibility issues, and the large SSD was also the second (data) disk. It was just a matter of pulling it out of the old laptop and putting it into the new one. Luckily, the tray fits both models. Continue reading →

Recently I came across the MK808 TV Stick on Amazon while looking for a streaming box for the bedroom. All other TV sets in the house have wired Ethernet connections and I configured various other, more expensive devices for Internet access. I failed to anticipate the need for an Ethernet connection in the corner of the bedroom where the TV is mounted (and did not want to disturb the insulation in an exterior wall for no good reason). Consequently, I had shied away from spending hundreds of dollars on a wireless solution that would then not get the required bandwidth. But when I saw that MK808 selling for around $50, that barrier vanished, and I decided to try it out.

As an Android developer and user (I have 5 other Android devices in the family – 3 phones and 2 tablets) , I knew what to expect in terms of usability and limitations of the UI when not used with a touch screen. It was no suprise to find that there are some issues, but nothing I can’t live with.

There are, however, issues with Flash content. The MK808 ships with Android 4.1.1 (Jelly Bean). The Flash Player was installed, and yet I get errors like this one on certain websites:

Flash error on daserste.de.

The same video plays perfectly fine on my Asus EEE Slider tabled with Android 4.0.1 and on my Samsung Galaxy SII with Android 4.2.2. So what is the problem with the MK808?

If you are experiencing issues with Flash on an Android device, you have most likely already found out that Flash support for Android has ended with Version 10.1 of the player. Searching for an update on the Google Play store will only have brought up adware. I backed up the Flash Player APK from the tabled and reinstalled it on the MK808 – still no luck.

Turns out that add-ons are disabled by default in the Android browser:

After years of disappointment with the anemic Synology RS407 NAS, I finally ran out of space and had an excuse to upgrade. I opted for a QNAP device. All reviews suggested that the low read & write performance of many NASs is due to the ARM processor, so I went with an Intel Atom model – the TS-459U. I chose QNAP over some of the other vendors in the high performance SOHO NAS space because of the security camera support and the other software features that are almost as convenient as Synology’s software. QNAP supports up to 4 cameras out of the box without additional license fees – Synology charges around $50 for licenses in addition to the single camera that is supported out of the box.

Here is the initial report. First and foremost, I am not disappointed. The write performance is almost 3x what I got before:

The SATA controller’s mode of operation cannot be changed to AHCI after Windows 7 is installed, because the AHCI driver will be missing and the system cannot boot. Here is how to address this without repairing or re-installing Windows.

With the SATA controller still running in IDE mode, start the registry editor as administrator. To do that, type regedit in the Start menu’s search box (without hitting Enter), then right-click on the single search result in the Programs category, and select Run as administrator. Then navigate to the key HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Services\msahci. Edit the value for Start and set it to 0:

AHCI fix in the registry

Then shut down normally and enter the Bios setup while rebooting (by pressing F2, Del, or whatever applies to your hardware). Now you can change the IDE mode to AHCI and Windows will load the AHCI driver the next time it starts up.

Imagine the possibilities. You can now surf the web while riding the waves in Hawaii, read your emails while taking a shower, take your iPad on long walks in the pouring New England rain, or book your next vacation online while you are in the middle of a sand storm in the Sahara desert. And your iPad will still look like new. You can even accidentally drop it into the toilet (flushing is fine, too).

The single most important iPad accessory

The douchePad is the single most important accessory for your new iPad. On sale for $19.99 plus shipping and handling. Time is running out. Call now to order.

My last computer, purchased in January 2006, was a barebone kit from TigerDirect based on an Asus P5NSLI motherboard and a 3GHz Pentium D dual core processor. I added 2 XFX GForce 7600 graphics accelerators with SLI. It was reasonably fast back then and still is today. I am not a notorious gamer, but knowing that some of my older titles will run well is important to me.

So I decided to upgrade. The one thing that bothered me most about my 2006 purchase was that it was so noisy. The stock fan for the Pentium D was the only fan in the case (aside from the one in the power supply), and it contributed to 99% of the overall noise level. I just never got around to replacing it, but it bothered me enough to vow to myself that I was going to do a better job this time.

But how do you do that? Unlike in Europe, the major online retailers here in the US don’t publish any data about the noise that their computers generate. If you want a quiet PC, you are on your own. Sometimes online reviewers will leave clues about whether a particular model is noisy or quiet, but that’s about it. I did not want to take a chance.

Help came in the form of an article in the world’s best! computer magazine – the German C’t. In the 2/15/2010 issue, an article titled “Gaming Power Galore” (my own translation) featured recommendations for one AMD and one Intel-based quiet, yet powerful gaming PC for under 1000 €. I went for it and decided to build the Intel platform for under $1000 (I missed my goal by a few dollars).

After some quick price checks for the core components I ended up on Newegg,com. Unfortunately I did not get the exact same configuration. The original setup included components from Be quiet!, Revoltec, and Sharkoon, which are all German brands that do not cater to the US market. I substituted the case, the hard disk enclosure, and the PSU with equivalent components that were available at Newegg at a similar price (see the table below). For the CPU fan, the Samsung HDD, and the Quiet Drive enclosure I had to venture to Ebay (neither were available on Newegg.com), which drove up the overall shipping cost a little.

C’t

DDDoD

Processor

Intel Core-I5-750

158 €

Intel Core-I5-750

$199.99

Motherboard

MB MSI P55-GD65

127 €

MB MSI P55-GD65 1156 RT

$114.99

Memory

2×2 GB DDR3 PC3-10600

78 €

2x2GB KST KVR1333 DDR3

$107.98

HDD

SAMSUNG SPINPOINT HD103SJ 1TB

69 €

SAMSUNG SPINPOINT HD103SJ 1TB

$87.64

DVD

LITE-ON IHAS124-04

28 €

LITE-ON IHAS124-04

$26.99

Case

Revoltec Sixty 2

44 €

Cooler Master RC-534-KKN2-GP

$54.99

Heat sink/fan

Scythe Samurai ZZ

20 €

SCYTHE SCSMZ-2000 SAMURAI ZZ

$26.99

HDD silencing

Sharkoon HDD Vibe-Fixer

13 €

Scythe Quiet Drive

$15.00

Case fan

Sharkoon Silent Eagle SE 120mm

13 €

n/a (Cooler Master case ships with 2 fans)

Card reader

Silverstone FP35

22 €

n/a (not needed)

OS

Windows 7 Home Premium

75 €

n/a (not needed)

Graphics

Radeon HD 5850

260 €

HIS HD5850 1G Retail

$339.99

PSU

Be quiet! BQT L7-530W

50 €

Zephyr 580MX 580W

$64.99

Shipping

25 €

$35

Total

982 €

$1074.55

One thing to note is that most high-end CPU coolers have vertically mounted fans – such fans create an airflow across the motherboard (towards a rear case fan, for instance). My case has a CPU air intake on the side that I wanted to take advantage of – hence the Samurai, which is less dramatic in appearance, but has a horizontal fan that creates an airflow perpendicular to the processor and motherboard and works well in my configuration.

Putting everything together is more or less routine. The objective of this post is to provide purchasing advice, not to provide a build-your-own-pc tutorial, so I will skip this part. Here is what it looked like towards the end:

Note that the CPU fan has an unobstructed path for the incoming air flow into the heat sink. The hard drive is not in the Quiet Drive enclosure yet, which arrived a few days later. I added 2 more disks in a Raid configuration that are also not shown in the picture.

So, now that the thing is put together, how does it perform? Pretty well, I think, and so does Windows 7. On a scale from 0 to 7.9, I am getting:

It looks like the hard disk is slowing everything down, when in fact it is not. To put the 5.9 score into context, here is the experience index from my Lenovo T410 with a Core I7 processor and an Intel SSD:

The same build of Windows 7 Enterprise is running on both machines, so the underlying metrics have to be the same as well. Apparently Windows 7 thinks the Samsung disk is as fast as an SSD!?

The thermal situation is on the cool side, where we want it to be. I had perpetual problems with the Pentium D and the heat sink for its LGA775 socket, with temperatures up to 70C (deadly for any processor under normal circumstances). Not so anymore. The 2 case fans are quiet, and the Scythe Samurai does its job very well. It is not quiet, but it is much less noisy than the old system that I am replacing. There is just no way to completely silence a CPU fan running under an intake opening on the side of the case.\

The disk is cool as well, despite the fact that the Quiet Drive enclosure is very tight and allows no ciculation at all.

The above screen shot is from an idling system, with Outlook, Excel, a few browsers, and Windows Live Writer running, which I use to write this blog post. Temperatures throughout the system are around 30C, which is perfect, and if I wanted to, I could push it a little and play with the many over-clocking features that the MSI board came with.

Oddly, SpeedFan does not seem to recognize the HD 5850 graphics accelerator. It did show the temperature of both GForce 7600 cards in my old system. The last screen shot below shows the temperatures of the cores while playing Need For Speed for a while. They creep up to 40C, but flatten out at that level.

I don’t have any Direct-X 11 games that I could test with – other than Dirt 2 that came with the HD 5850, but the combination of having to register both with Steam and Windows Live, and the inability to save game progress locally without an Internet connection, are strong reasons not to install it.

All in all, I built a very fast and (for a gaming PC) reasonably quiet system that did not cost the world. I recommend this configuration.